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SFDesigner:DW’s Weekly Mobile Wunderlist #002

The last full week of October saw a number of additional hardware announcements from Nokia, unveiling their new Windows Phone devices, and Samsung which held their Galaxy Note launch event in London. Read on for more information on the events of the week.

The largest announcement this week was that Apple dropped from the top spot for global smartphone shipments for Q3 2011, losing out to Samsung which took the top spot. This shift may be temporary as the iPhone 4S shipment was outside of the quarter and is based on iPhone 4 sales which were believed to be stunted due to the next iPhone announcement. Apple shipped 17.1 million units, with Samsung selling 27.8. Nokia took third with 16.8. In terms of marketshare, Samsung accounts for 22.8%, Apple and Nokia are nearly tied with 14.6 and 14.4% respectively with others taking 47.3%. It should be noted that this is is based on manufacturer. Samsung makes phones for two platforms, Android and Windows Phone, so this does not account for platform in the data.

There where additional hacker attempts to port the Siri functionality of the iPhone 4S to other devices including the iPad, iPhone 4 and iPod touch. The attempts have limited success however since Siri relies on a server component to provide full functionality.

In Apple related news, some of the original people behind the iPod have launched their newest venture, the Nest Learning thermostat. The circular device features an intelligent learning mode that knows when to economize on energy when you are in our out of the house and offers scheduling and customization over the web or an iOS app.

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Following on the news from last week, there were some additional developments, specifically with the Motorola Droid RAZR and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Motorola announced that the RAZR was shipping with a locked bootloader; which differed from their commitment earlier in the year that they were going to move away from this practice. They updated their position later stating that they would keep the bootloader unlocked if the carrier didn’t require it.

Google announced that Ice Cream Sandwich would be compatible for the previous generation of their Nexus line, the Nexus S; however, they stated that the original Nexus One from HTC will not be compatible with the operating system.

In new hardware news, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, a hybrid phone and tablet device running Android 2.3 Gingerbread that features a pressure-sensitive stylus called the S Pen with a number of stylus applications bundled with the device. Samsung also stated that they will be releasing an SDK to take advantage of the style functionality for third party applications. The device features a high-resolution Super AMOLED screen that measures 5.3 inches in diameter with a resolution of 1280×800. There are no specifics on US availability; however the FCC approved the device in September of 2011.

Google also announced that the Google TV platform will be updated next week with Honeycomb and Android Market for the Sony Google TV and shortly afterwards for the Logitech Revue.

This week was a significant hardware week for Windows Phone with Nokia announcing their first batch of twin Windows Phone devices this week in London’s Nokia World. Nokia’s two devices, the Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 were released. The 800 is a modification of the popular EU-only N9 that ran MeeGo. The 800 features a number of Nokia exclusive applications including turn-by-turn navigation and additional entertainment options outside of Microsoft Zune. Nokia also announced that they will be giving away 25,000 800’s to developers.

The Lumia 710 is a lower end device with a larger form factor, but still contains the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system. Currently the devices are launching first in the EU, without many details on availability in the US. The devices are not as powerful as some of the newer Windows Phone devices like the HTC Titan, and they lack a front-facing camera, but they are priced more reasonably with the goal perhaps to be more about adoption over high-end features. In other device news, Samsung and AT&T announced that the Samsung Focus Flash and Focus S will be released on November 6th.

Also at Nokia World, the new XBox Companion application was previewed. This application lets you search via Bing for content using Zune Video Marketplace, and other media service providers. The app should be available at the time of the upcoming XBox Dashboard update later this year. In other application news, the Tango video service should be available for Windows Phone devices on November 7th.

In addition to Nokia World announcements, Microsoft has stated that Mango is now available for all compatible devices throughout the globe. In addition, an executive at Nokia stated that the next version of Windows Phone called “Apollo” will be available in mid-2012.

Finally, in executive shakeups, former head of WebOS Developer Relations, Richard Kerris, is leaving HP to go to Nokia to presumably head up their developer team as well.

After last week’s announcements from RIM, there were a few additional announcements. First was the delay of the PlayBook OS 2.0 pushed from October 2011 to a new target of February 2012. The announcement also stated that to meet this new date, the BBM instant-messaging service has been dropped from the release.

In addition, the BMM Social Platform SDK 1.0 for WebWorks was released along with the WebWorks SDK 2.2. This provides a number of BMM integration points when used with the WebWorks SDK. The WebWorks 2.2 SDK for smartphones includes new Mac OS X support, payment APIs, and updates to support JavaScript extensions for BlackBerry 5.0, 6, and 7.

At the annual RIA Unleashed conference in Boston this week, the new Adobe Flex 4.6 SDK and Adobe Flash Builder 4.6 products were previewed which enables developers to create tablet applications targeting Adobe AIR for iOS, Android and BlackBerry PlayBook OS. In addition, presentations on the new Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.0 releases were covered including the new Stage3D support for desktop and TVs.

Betas for the next version of Flash Player and AIR were posted on Adobe Labs supporting multi-threaded video decoding for all supported platforms and for Flash Player, background updates on Windows.

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Adobe’s acquisition of PhoneGap completed on October 25th. With that deal Nitobi has contributed the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation under the name Apache Callback. Adobe will continue to host the PhoneGap online community as well as the PhoneGap Build service which will be part of the Creative Cloud offering that will have additional details shared in November

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On October 28th, the new ThemeRoller for Mobile tool was released in Beta. This tool is similar to the jQuery UI tool of the same name, but is focused on theming the jQuery Mobile framework for use in mobile browsers or technologies like PhoneGap. The tool supports themes, swatches, vidual gradient tools, and integration with Adobe kuler for better color selection and management. This is on the heels of the jQuery Mobile 1.0 Release Candidate 2 announcement made on October 19th.

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Appcelerator announced their acquisition of Particle Code. Partcile code is a framework that allows developers to create native applications for various smartphone platfroms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 as well as HTML5 and Flash web applications.

The platform allows developers to work in object-oriented langues such as Java and ActionScript 3 within an Eclipse IDE environment supporting visual user interface design support for various devices.

The acquisition details are private as both companies are privately held; however the FAQ for the acquisition stated that all 11 employees of Particle Code are joning the Mountain View based Appcelerator team and merging their efforts with the Titanium paltform. The existing Particle SDK platform will be supported and transition to the Titanium platform will be provided as well.